Network Enabled Capability: Decentralised Coordination of Autonomous Agents to Achieve Operational Goals

Abstract : The move from platform centric planning to network enabled capability poses not only organizational challenges but also challenges to the technology that will be needed to enable networked operations. Within this context, this paper outlines the central role that autonomous software agents, that coordinate their activities in flexible ways, have to play in providing robust system solutions. The major research challenges are addressed in order to take this promising technology forward and to make it suitable for NEC application. The interactions of the various autonomous agents within the system, that are necessary in order to achieve their individual and collective aims, can be analyzed and designed using techniques from Game Theory and Mechanism Design. Game theory is exploited because it has developed powerful tools for analyzing decision making in decentralized open systems with multiple autonomous agents. Recently, these tools have been tailored to computational settings to provide a principled foundation for building multiple agent systems. This tailoring gives rise to the field of computational mechanism design.